Self Reflection

This summer I’ve learned a lot regarding comics and graphic novels. I’ve witnessed that comics and graphic novels aren’t for nerds and that they aren’t childish. Yeah they are a picture book in a sense but the author uses it to better tell his story to his or her audience. It’s the style that they write that is just so fascinating. It’s not told by a narrator or someone who’s not in the book, most comics are told by the people in the story. So after reading a couple of books you get to see that these books are kind of sort of a movie in a sense. Because the dialogue is told in a script sort of way. You don’t need all those detail sentences so that you can picture the story better in your head. The pictures do that for you.      

My favorite book that we read in class had to be American Born Chinese. Why? Simply because it’s an easy read and it has a great story line. It has the three different stories that uniquely come together as one at the end of the book. I was reading it and when it happened I was caught off guard. They all had different storylines so to think that they could all end up being the same thing wasn’t even a thought in my head as I was reading it. But my favorite part about it was that it taught you as a reading a lesson. That lesson being that you shouldn’t change who you are just because it’s how you can “fit in”. Be who you are and who you want to be. Other than that, it had some great humor throughout the graphic novel.

Throughout this course I’ve gained the ability to read a comic book or graphic novel with tools that’ll help me better understand the story that’s being told. For instance Molly Bangs Theory, her theory allows for a much better experience reading if you understand and read carefully. The pointing lines giving for a scared emotion by the reader, the middle of the picture being the center of attention and the main focus and another being the ability to read a picture by not only reading the words but the picture as well.

Most kids go to school thinking they are going to learn something just for that time period and then after the class ends, boom, all that information in their brain is just washed away. But this class used a unique style when the professor taught that it allowed you to go more into depth with what you’re studying or reading. It wasn’t necessarily information she was teaching, it was how to receive that information. The style was just so strange that I was so into it.